populace rushing up the staircase at the opposite side of the court, and calling out my name joined to a hundred atrocious epithets.  My situation now obviously became difficult; for our advance would be met at the next minute by the assassins.  The girl’s presence of mind saved me; she flew back to the end of the gallery, threw open a small door which led to the roof; and I was in the open air, with the stars bright above me, and a prodigious extent of the country, including Nantz, beneath.

“Yet you may believe that the landscape was not among my principal contemplations at the moment, though my eyes involuntarily turned on the town; where, from the blazes springing up in various quarters, I concluded that a general pillage had begun.  That pillage was the order of the day much nearer to me, I could fully conceive, from the opening and shutting of doors, and the general tumult immediately under the leads where I stood.  “Situation, gentlemen,” said the old general, smiling, “is something, but circumstances are necessary to make it valuable.  There never was a finer night for an investigation of the stars, if I had been an astronomer; and I dare say that the spot which formed my position would have been capital for an observatory; but the torches which danced up and down through the old and very dingy casements of the mansion, were a matter of much more curious remark to me than if I had discovered a new constellation.

“At length I was chased even out of this spot—­my door had been found out.  I have too much gallantry left to suppose that my Breton had betrayed me; though a dagger at her heart and a purse in her hand might be powerful arguments against saving the life of an old soldier who had reached his grand climacteric.  At all events, as I saw torch after torch rising along the roofs, I moved into the darkness.

“I had here a new adventure.  I saw a feeble light gleaming through the roof.  An incautious step brought me upon a skylight, and I went through; my fall, however, being deadened by bursting my way through the canopy of a bed.  I had fallen into the hospital of the chateau.  A old Beguine was reading her breviary in an adjoining room.  She rushed in with a scream.  But those women are so much accustomed to casualties that I had no sooner acquainted her with the reasons of my flight, than she offered to assist my escape.  She had been for some days in attendance on a sick servant.  She led me down to the entrance of a subterranean communication between the mansion and the river, one of the old works which had probably been of serious service in the days when every chateau in the West was a fortress.  The boat which had brought her from the convent was at the mouth of the subterranean; there, the Loire was open.  If you ask, why I did not prefer throwing myself before the pursuers, and dying like a soldier, my reason was, that I should have been numbered merely among those who had fallen obscurely in the various skirmishes of the country; and besides, that if I escaped, I should have one chance more of preserving the province.